Night After Night

The future is an infinite succession of presents.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."—Howard Zinn

From You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Beacon Press; 2002

(More than anything else, this is what I have to remember, and to believe, right now. I promise to post more, soon.)

The role of a critic is to pull apart the work…

The popular understanding of what a critic does is that a critic tells you whether something is good or bad. But that is the least interesting part of a critic’s job, when all is said and done, because two critics can see the same movie, agree largely on its strengths and flaws, then weight them very differently in their heads.

No, the role of a critic is to pull apart the work, to delve into the marrow of it, to figure out what it is trying to say about our society and ourselves. You can love a work and think its politics are deeply problematic; you can believe something is terrible yet offers some accidentally acute insights about the way the world works."—Todd VanDerWerff

From "Why cultural criticism matters"
Vox, December 31, 2018

Here's another impactful passage from the same essay:

"If I were in charge of a major publication, I would probably be hiring political reporters, too. But on the other hand, cultural criticism is important — vitally so. Sure, it’s how I earn a paycheck, but long before I got into this line of work, great cultural journalism gave me other ways of looking at and understanding the world, which is core to journalism’s mission statement. We need cultural criticism not just to tell us which movies to go see and which ones to avoid, but to tell us things we already knew but didn’t know how to express. If reporting can explain the world to us, cultural criticism can explain us to us."

A much-loved but hopelessly broken toy.

I believe that our culture (and by “our culture” I’m talking about North America, and perhaps also Europe, to some extent) has undergone a fundamental shift. Expertise is no longer much valued in the cultural sphere; rather, it seems that the currently prevailing belief is that any one person’s opinion is as good as any other’s. Furthermore, if critical judgements are acknowledged at all, they are the judgements of the masses, expressed in economic terms: what is best is what sells the most.…

As a profession, classical music criticism emerged in the early 19th century and remained an esteemed aspect of musical culture to the end of the 20th century. It had a good run. But to cling to the idea, in the year 2018, that music criticism remains somehow relevant, and to soldier on with it, is to behave like a child clinging to a much-loved but hopelessly broken toy who refuses to throw it away and get on with life.—Colin Eatock

From "It was fun while it lasted"
Eatock Daily, May 31, 2018

An economy of lovehearts and thumbs up.

At the individual level, however, all social relationships are open to monetization or careerism. Artists, curators and writers have ended up at the same openings, dinner tables and panel discussions for decades, but the operations of their relationships and tastes have never been more visible. What happens when behavior changes to suit the network? Or art does? When every actor in a network is aware, painfully aware, that they are part of the same milieu, criticism becomes increasingly fraught. Social networking is generally hostile to critical conversation – being based on an economy of lovehearts and thumbs up. Socializing is now highly professionalized. A critic friend reviews an artist friend's exhibition and posts it online. The artist publicly thanks the critic. It all gets a lot of likes. They like each other's pictures of cats. You liked them too. (This is all a form of work, don't forget.)—Laura McLean-Ferris

From "Declaration of Dependence"
, Even issue 1, Summer 2015